The concept of "world literature" has undergone continuous reconstruction, drawing global scholarly attention. Scholars like Volkmar and Damrosch highlight its deep entrenchment in Eurocentrism, with the Western literary system holding a meta-linguistic position in its discourse. However, as Western scholars adopt a more global perspective, "world literature" is shedding its Western-centric framework and evolving into a truly global construct.

With the inclusion of literary works and theories from Eastern civilizations (such as China, India, ancient Egypt, and ancient Babylon) in cross-cultural studies, the implicit Eurocentric and Western-dominant discursive power embedded in "world literature" is gradually dissolving, allowing the term to regain its intrinsic "worldly" essence. However, despite the increasing self-examination and critique of Western-centrism in world literature studies since the mid-to-late 20th century, the question of how to further reconstruct the concept of "world literature" remains an urgent issue for global scholars. Fundamentally, world literature serves as a bridge connecting literary traditions across different regions, yet its ultimate aim lies in leveraging the universal power of literature to mitigate the cultural estrangement and civilizational conflicts that have emerged over the past century. A proper understanding and interpretation of world literature can foster mutual understanding and inclusivity among civilizations.

This article argues that world literature must shift toward the epistemological paradigm of "mutual learning among civilizations." Throughout human history, civilizational exchanges have never ceased, and world literature increasingly exhibits a "multi-civilizational" nature. For instance, the intertextuality between The Homeric Epics and The Epic of Gilgamesh, the influence of Arab culture on the European Renaissance, and the presence of Eastern elements in modern Western literary theory all underscore the fundamental rule that mutual learning among civilizations drives world development. Accordingly, the study and reading of world literature should also align with this direction. This issue extends beyond literary research, generating a "domino effect" that shapes global political, economic, and cultural landscapes. While Huntington's "clash of civilizations" has influenced the geopolitical conflicts of the 21st century, in the face of the unprecedented global transformations of our time, both Chinese and international scholars must take on the responsibility of fostering civilizational harmony and mitigating conflicts. By approaching world literature through the lens of mutual learning among civilizations, scholars can expand the horizons of world literature studies, transcend cultural barriers through civilizational exchange, overcome conflicts through mutual learning, and replace notions of civilizational superiority with a vision of civilizational coexistence.

Throughout the nineteenth century, World Literature meant a view of the world from Europe, until a bidirectional East-West comparison developed in the twentieth century with figures such as Hu Shih, Lin Yutang, René Étiemble, and Earl Miner. These were often cultural comparisons between two “mighty opposites” such as China and Western Europe. The rise of globalization today gives us new opportunities to develop a variation theory of cultural interactions, both in the present and in the past. This talk will look at three examples of nonhegemonic comparison of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean works to Western counterparts, not on the basis of influence or of universal harmonies, but in terms of the writers’ responses to global economic and technological developments.

Most literary histories with a global ambition attempt to map the world, often tilted toward a European/Western perspective and written as a teamwork by individual experts on a variety of regions—and maybe originating from those regions—, each of them taking responsibility for their own linguistic and regional specialty. Often, the regional or local chapters offer little new insights for readers from that region, but useful insights for people from other parts of the world. A project along those lines follows what I will call a mapping strategy. This paper attempts to sketch an alternative, holding that world literature studies should take their point of departure in the dynamics of the mutual exchange following border crossings between cultures, localities and aesthetic forms and strategies. The example will be the recent Landscapes of Realism vols 1-2 (2021–2022) in ICLA’s series of literary histories.

Since the emergence of comparative literature, the academic description of communication relationships has been relatively single, mainly the influence relationships described by the French school. However, communication relationships are constantly changing and complex, and there cannot be only one type of communication relationship. In fact, there is still a network relationship of multiple points and lines, where multiple points refer to the plural reading list and multiple lines refer to the plural communication relationship between the reading list and specific literary texts. Specific literary texts cannot only obtain use cases or information from one book, but can also obtain use cases and information of the same word from multiple reading books, thus forming a network communication form. This requires researchers to investigate reading lists and their use cases in order to describe the scope of the communication object or communication object.

The way of signifying significance of ancient Chinese thoughts advocates “nothingness,” which is a type of poetics of “beyond language.” Ancient Chinese philosophical and literary concepts of art theory recognise the finitiness of the form to convey thoughts and feelings, thus pursuing the infinite mood or flavour beyond language in order to grasp the infinite with the finite, which becomes the major way of expressing Chinese literature and art. Some influential philosophical and poetic views of the West such as Martin Heidegger’s “reopen the question of being,” François Jullien’s poetics of “L’écart,” William Franke’s “Apophatic poetics,” or Jonathan Stalling’s “Poetics of Emptiness” come from Chinese poetics of “beyond language” that advocate expressing meanings through “nothingness.” Poetics of “beyond language” reveals the infinity of the meaning of discourse and the mobility of expression, which is related to the ultimate question of Chinese philosophy, and has profoundly influenced the way of thinking in China and the West; while expressed through literary games that fill in the blank between interpreting and being interpreted, it hits directly at the common thinking of the pursuit of truth in both China and the West, breaking through the language barrier and promoting the mutual learning of civilizations.